Peter Power/CFL.ca
It’s one of the most talked about but least seen elements of any CFL National Combine and every player that garners an iota of interest from a team goes through it.
The interview portion of the combine takes place on Friday and Saturday night. Teams will request prospects they’re interested in and get 15-minute windows with them, with the aim being to try to figure out as much about them as possible.
Every team handles them a little differently. When they were with the Toronto Argonauts, Jim Barker and Scott Milanovich could butter a player up with niceties then rocket a hardball question at them a second later.
I followed Mercer Timmis for a few of his interviews in 2016 in Toronto. When he walked into the conference room that the Argos had at the Hyatt on Bloor St., Barker seemed genuinely impressed with Timmis’ suit, telling him he looked like he was straight out of Mad Men (for the record, he nailed the look).
Just when the young running back got comfortable, Milanovich threw a blunt, pointed question at him about what he perceived as blocking issues.
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Craig Dickenson attends his first CFL Combine as a head coach (Peter Power/CFL.ca)
In his early days as a GM back in Edmonton, Ed Hervey had a tense interview with d-lineman Stefan Charles (the link to the video seems to have drifted into the abyss of the internet). At one point, Hervey seemed to sense that the conversation was going in an unproductive direction and asked Charles if he needed to take a minute. Hervey ended up drafting him 10th overall in 2013, but of course Charles spent the last five years years in the NFL, before joining the Alliance league this winter.
In 2016, the Saskatchewan Roughriders had an interesting setup for their interviews. At that same Bloor St. hotel, they had booked a double-room and propped the door slightly open. The prospect would walk through the door, then into the adjoining room to see Chris Jones, his coaching staff and a scout or two, all seated on couches. I had to walk the same route when I sat in on interviews that year and I was intimidated by the setup, just going in to say hello.
Jones told me that weekend that he liked to use every bit of the interview as a test. Sometimes they didn’t invite the prospect in. They’d just have him wait outside, seeing the door propped open and see if he’d walk in at the set time or wait for an invite. Every action, every hesitation, every word was under evaluation.
That’s why I was so curious about what the Riders’ interviews would look like this year. Chris Jones didn’t often say a lot in the media, but he cast a large shadow over the league as a head coach and a GM. His departure this winter for a role with the Cleveland Browns was sudden. Jeremy O’Day slid over from assistant VP of football ops and administration to assume the GM role and Craig Dickenson, a 17-year coaching vet in the CFL, made the move from special teams coordinator to head coach. After a lengthy paying of their respective dues, both are first-timers in these roles.
“What we’re really trying to do is build our locker room to be a high-character, hard-working group.”
Riders head coach Craig Dickenson
While the Riders held their interviews in a hotel room again, this year at the Marriott on Bloor-Yonge in Toronto, the setup wasn’t quite as intimidating. It was still effective, though. The seating arrangement was essentially in a circle, with Dickenson in a couch to the players’ right. Offensive coordinator Steve McAdoo was on a chair opposite the player and O’Day sat in a chair next to him. Chad Hudson, the Riders’ manager of football analytics and scouting, stood behind O’Day, bringing players into the room and occasionally checking on those waiting in the hallway to talk with the team. Finally, defensive coordinator Jason Shivers rounded out the circle, sitting at a chair on the players’ left.
I squirmed in between Dickenson and McAdoo, notepad in hand and spent the next 45 minutes trying to be as invisible as possible. I’ve left out the names of the three players I sat in on so that I can talk about their interviews more freely.
The questions at the beginning are straightforward. How did you get to your university team? What was your best game there? What was your worst? What do you do best at your position? What’s your biggest weakness? Then they get increasingly personal. Are you a leader? Can you do that at the pro level? Do you party? Drink? Smoke? Have you ever been in trouble?
“We have a standard questionnaire we give pretty much everybody,” Dickenson said on Sunday, as the players left the field at the end of the combine.
“We just want to ask them about adversity and some things they’ve faced in their lives. It’s honestly pretty much the same every year but tailored to each kid’s situation. You’ve got to get to know the kid a little bit, get a little bit of a background story so to speak, so we know what questions to ask.”
Sometimes in answering questions players give away more than they realize. One player told the Riders that the only trouble he’d been in was that as a kid, after he lost a fight in school a teacher heard him call the other guy ugly. McAdoo’s ears perked up at that.
“I’m more interested in how you lost that fight,” he told him.
Another interview seemed to go very well. The conversation was lively and revealing. Shivers then asked him if he was nasty, if he wanted to hurt people when he played.
The player talked about being at his best when he was happy, laughing, talking with people.
Shivers took it in, nodding. He asked him about what would happen if he had a teammate in the CFL with the opposite type of energy that gets in his face. The player said he didn’t let people disrespect him.
Shivers had made his mind made up on the player before the door closed behind him. He wasn’t impressed with that he’d heard.
An answer he did like? In the final interview I sat in on, after a player had spoken about the type of leader he was and what had been missing in his team this past season versus years past, he asked the player to give himself a tagline, just a quick one or two word descriptor of how he played.
“Disruptive. Versatile,” he said, without any hesitation.
“We’ve been doing these for a long time and I’ve been a part of them for a long time,” O’Day said of the interviews.
“Some of the questions we asked in every interview. Also if (the player) was on the offensive side or the defensive side, that coach that would ask more questions. We told the positional coaches, in our case the coordinators when it was their side of the ball to ask the questions they wanted and what’s nice with Craig, you’re able to ask all the time about special teams.”
Defensive coordinator Jason Shivers evaluates prospects on Sunday at the CFL Combine (Peter Power/CFL.ca)
They covered a lot of ground, for the most part, taking one conversation from the players’ work ethic to having him open up about the death of a friend and how that changed his life.
Dickenson said that the hardest part of the interviews was trying to make the most of that time.
“Sometimes you just get started and you’re really getting the chance to know the kid and the next thing you know the time’s up,” he said. “It’s quantity over quality at this sort of thing.”
For O’Day and Dickenson, this weekend was also a chance for them to continue to settle into their new roles and for their staff to get on a field and work together.
“We just brought a few of our coaches, but the more time you can spend together the more you can get to know each other and work together, the more trust you build,” Dickenson said.
“We’ve been together a few times (as a staff) since the changes were made, but it helps the more time we’re around each other and relaying the message that we want to bring to our team and our players and the atmosphere we want to create,” O’Day said.
“A lot of it will be the same and there’ll be some subtle changes with Craig taking over as the head coach, but there’s a lot of success that happened with Chris there that we’ll continue on with.”
It’s hard to assume a job and instantly put your stamp on it. That wouldn’t happen in the short time that Dickenson and O’Day have been in their roles and Dickenson said it’s not really something he evisions on his end.
“I don’t think it’s going to be my own (thing),” he said.
“What we’re really trying to do is build our locker room to be a high-character, hard-working group. I think the locker room ends up taking over (a team’s identity), but certainly we have some say in what sort of guys we put in that locker room. Ultimately we want the team to be representative of the players and not the coaches.”
